John Goldsmith's visLog

Indenting multiple tree control items in Visio

The wireframing template in Visio has a treeview control to that allows you to add and remove items, and set their respective indent levels.  By default you can only adjust a single item at a time and even if you create a multiple selection, only the primary item is effected.  A forum question asked how you could make a single change to multiple items and I thought I would write a quick bit of code to show how you might go about it.

Modifying a Visio master shape

There was a question on the Visio forum recently on how to modify a built-in shape and I thought I'd jot down a quick walkthrough of how you might approach the problem.  In this instance I’m going to change the way the line weight scales, but the principle of how you modify and create your own master will be the same in most cases.

Customising Contextual Ribbon Tabs In Visio 2010

I’ve recently been transferring some old VBA ShapeSheet utilities over to a c# add-in for Visio 2010 and hit a problem when trying to add some custom groups to the ShapeSheet Design ribbon tab.  Using Ribbon.xml, I was happily able to add groups to either custom tabs or built-in ones such as ‘Home’, but for love nor money couldn’t get anything to show in the ShapeSheet tab. 

Chris Hopkins, from the Visio team, kindly set me straight and the solution was in understanding that not all tabs are created equal and that the ShapeSheet Design tab belongs to a set called Contextual Tabs…

New book Using Visio 2010

Congratulations to Chris Roth (aka Visio Guy) who’s just finished a new book on, as the title describes, Using Visio 2010.

I haven’t got my hands on a paper copy yet, as Chris has, but I have had a look at the table of contents and sample chapters available over at the publisher’s site and it looks a pretty comprehensive read. I say read, but there’s also several hours of video and online material to accompany the book.

In the unlikely event that you read this blog and not VisGuy.com then you might not know that Chris is a long time Visio expert (even reaching back into the pre-Microsoft days). It’s no surprise then that his book gives you not just the ‘how’ but also the ‘why’ and ‘when’ to use a specific part of the Visio functionality.

I’m looking forward to buying my physical copy and I’d certainly recommend it to anyone wanting to become more productive in using this great visual tool.

New Visio book, training videos and Business Model template

Spotted a few links I thought I’d highlight today:

• MVP Scott Helmers has a new book out – Microsoft Visio 2010 Step by Step.  I haven’t read it yet, but by the look of the table of contents it looks like a great resource on how to get the most out of Visio 2010.  The ebook is available now and I believe the print version is due early May.
• Also on the learning theme, Visio expert David Edson has a new video training series (Visio 2010 Essential Training) available at Lynda.com.  Again it’s a great resource and I notice there’s three free videos to give you a taster of what’s included. 
• Finally, I spotted this business model template from Diderik Vanwingerden, which I found appealing – demonstrates what a great collaborative tool Visio is.

Book review - Microsoft Visio 2010 Business Process Diagramming and Validation

Fellow Visio MVP David Parker has just had a new book published covering all of the new structured diagramming and validation functionality available in Visio 2010.  I’ve been lucky enough to be sent a copy by the publisher and so I thought I’d write a quick review...

Touch gestures construction – zOrder in groups

In the next few posts I thought I’d take a look at some interesting aspects of the Touch Gesture shapes from a Visio shape development perspective.

To kick things off, this post will look at one way to achieve blending circles, without any [apparent] overlap…

Using Office 2010 Background Removal with Visio

I spotted a blog post the other day about a new feature in Office 2010 that enables you to ‘crop’ a subject out of an image.  The feature is called Background Removal and is part of Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2010:

• The magic of background removal – Office 2010 Engineering

The need for this type of functionality crops up in Visio from time to time and both Chris Roth and I have come up with mask workarounds for this in past:

• Super Mask Visio Clipping Shape – VisGuy.com
• Highlighting images using a mask - visLog

Visio 2010 – Custom context menus

You’ll have to forgive the poor menus analogy, but I get bored with the same old pictures…

Anyway, on with another new feature in Visio 2010 – Multi-level custom context menus.  The current and previous versions of Visio have allowed you to add custom menu items to the context menu of pages and shapes and if you haven’t done so yourself, you only need to right-click on some of the built-in shapes such as the ‘Flowchart shapes’ shape (in the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil) to see them at work.  One limitation, however, has been the inability to group the menu items into any kind of hierarchy.  Basically, all menu items that you add, get placed at the top level.  Visio 2010 changes that…

Visio 2010 – Save As Silverlight

Continuing my review of some of the new features in Visio 2010, today I’m going to look at some exciting functionality that enables you to save your diagrams out to Silverlight…